In businesses, conference room solutions are a must particularly when a large number of meetings are often required. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) conference phones provide the ability to conference multiple parties together from an audio perspective. With next generation technologies, the ability to also conference multiple parties together from a video perspective can be offered. Conference phones, however, typically offer a very limited user interface for setting up conference calls. Some have small displays that provide feedback but users are forced to deal with a button interface that is typically not intuitive.
This is further compounded by the fact that a conference phone is most often a common use device found in a meeting room, which means users do not benefit from frequent repeated use as they would with their desk phone. With the use of a larger touch screen display, a more intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) can be provided that enables an infrequent user of a meeting room conference phone to easily discover how to set up a multi-party audio or video conference call.
Meeting room conference phones typically provide a simple telephone interface made up of a dialpad, hard keys such as mute, volume and redial. Some offer a small display and soft keys that work with the display to offer context sensitive buttons to aid in setting up a conference call. Often, however, this type of interface is inadequate for setting up and managing a conference call of more than three parties that includes the ability to escalate participants to video.
A system and method is therefore needed to provide a GUI that overcomes the above-described challenges. At the same time, the GUI should be intuitive and user friendly so that handling conference calls can be easily accomplished. These, as well as other related advantages and features, will be described in the present disclosure.